Fixing flashing backlight for Acer AL1711 17" LCD Monitor

 

I was testing to see if changing the brightness on my LCD caused differences in the pitch emitted from the inverter when it adjusted luminosity. With my ear against the back of the monitor, and my finger pressing the increase brightness button, I listened for differences in loudness. Unbeknownst to me, when I reached 100% brightness, this overloaded the inverter and the backlight turned off.

After that, I thought the inverter had by coincidence come to its end, because when I would turn off, and restart the monitor, the backlight and screen would flash on for a quarter second and then immediately turn off.

Then I started troubleshooting. After a couple hours of trying to configure the monitor using the OSD on an unbacklit monitor (which is very hard, do it in daylight so that you can see the contents of the screen), I finally solved the problem. What I did was decrease the brightness to minimum on the OSD, and I exited the OSD. The backlight did not come back on when I decreased the brightness in the OSD. I had to save the settings, exit the OSD, and restart the monitor. Then, when it lit up, the reduced brightness was within the (aging) specs of the inverter, so it didn't flash off immediately.

Hope this helps someone. If so, please leave a comment. Enjoy!

PIO Mode slows your computer to a crawl

I’ve come across several computers in the past few months that have experienced an inexplicable slow down in performance. They were all single-core Pentium M machines running Windows XP. The owners complained that recently the machines had been running extremely slowly. Simple multimedia tasks like watching Youtube videos or browsing the internet while on a Skype Video call were too much for the computer to handle, causing choppy video and sound.

At first I checked all the usual candidates such as startup programs, antivirus, etc. Optimizing these settings did nothing. And it seemed like the hard drive was extremely slow. Processor usage was also always spiking near 100%. My initial conclusion was that these multimedia programs had become too resource-intensive for the older processors to handle.

These were some additional symptoms that I noticed:

• Windows XP took 2-3 minutes just to get to the login screen
• The hard drive light blinked slowly, like there was a delay in loading data
• Every computer operation seemed to take an inordinate amount of CPU usage, and multiple tasks slowed to a crawl.
• DVD’s played very choppily, with continual breaks in the sound

I then remembered about an obscure setting that could be causing the problems. The hard drive had reverted to a slow transfer mode known as PIO (Programmed Input/Output) from the default DMA mode (Direct Memory Access). Essentially, in PIO mode, the CPU has to process any data accessed from the hard drive instead of the data directly transferring to system memory. (See the image below).

This explained why simple tasks required so much processor usage. Also, in streaming videos, because the processor had to both process the downloading data as well as process the video, it was simply overloaded.

The reason that the hard drive or optical reverts to this mode is rather obscure. According to Microsoft:

After the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a cumulative total of six time-out or cyclical redundancy check (CRC) errors, the driver reduces the communications speed (the transfer mode) from the highest Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode to lower DMA modes in steps. If the driver continues to receive time-out or CRC errors, the driver eventually reduces the transfer mode to the slowest mode (PIO mode).

Windows automatically reduces performance if it detects errors which arise when the computer resumes from Sleep mode.

Anyway, the fix is quite simple: Go to Device Manager, locate IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and right-click on each IDE channel (primary and/or secondary). Under the Advanced Settings tab of each channel, check if any of the connected devices show PIO as the “Current Transfer Mode” (see image below). If so, go to the Driver tab and choose uninstall. Then check the secondary IDE channel in a similar fashion. When you restart the computer, the IDE channels should be restored to full speed DMA mode (confirm this in Device Manager). Test your videos and general computer performance. You’ll be pleasantly surprised!

This fix brought new life to computers that I had assumed as obsolete.

If this tip helps you solve a problem, please leave a comment! Enjoy!

Windows XP start-up lag due to Services not starting

This was a very strange and annoying problem that I had to troubleshoot on a client’s computer which was running Windows XP Home. Basically, every time I rebooted the computer, the system would hang for an unknown reason. Web pages wouldn’t load in Internet Explorer, I wasn’t able to load system properties if I right-clicked on My Computer.

I looked at the services list (Start—>Run—>services.msc). Two services were hanging in the “starting” state: Server and Fax. Apparently, Print Spooler was trying to start before Server, which can cause this hanging behavior.

To fix this glitch, I reconfigured the Spooler service to be dependent on Server to prevent the wrong start-up order. Simply open regedit, navigate to:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Spooler

Locate the “DependOnService” entry, and double-click to edit. Under Value data, add a new line and enter “LanmanServer” (see screenshot below). This will force Print Spooler to wait for Server to load before attempting to load itself.

This solved half of my problem. When I restarted, I no longer had the hang-up in the system. However, Fax service still did not load fully. To fix this, I disabled it from automatically starting. It was an unessential process on that computer, and if needed, it could be easily started up manually.

If this helps you solve a problem in your own system, please leave a comment. Enjoy!

Unable to Access Files on a Networked Computer – “Not enough server storage is available to process the command”.

After a long days’ work for a client repairing, updating, and optimizing his workstations at the office, I was disappointed to hear back from him the next day that he could not access the critical files that were stored on his main computer when connecting from other computers on the network. All his workstations are running Windows XP Home.

If computer A is his main PC, and computer B is the secondary PC, computer A could access network shares from B, but B could not access network shares from A. From computer B, I could see the shared folders and printers in computer A, but when I tried to open a shared folder, I received the following error message

“You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

Not enough server storage is available to process this command.”

 

At first I assumed it was a firewall problem, but that wasn’t the case. I hadn’t changed any major on the machine except a few Microsoft updates, an AVG update, and installing Acronis Drive Image 2010, so I was quite dumbfounded at first.

Digging a bit deeper, it turns out that the problem was related to the second half of the error message: “Not enough server storage is available to process this command.” On Computer A, I checked the event log which showed many entries with Event ID: 2011, similar to the screenshot below.

Apparently, Acronis has an incompatibility that causes the IRPStackSize parameter for the Server service in Windows XP to be insufficient for incoming network requests. Thus, when computer B would attempt to open a network share on computer A, the error was returned.

To solve this, I followed the steps outlined here to add the IRPStackSize in computer A’s registry. The default value for this parameter is 15, but according to some research I did on the web, a larger value is required to remove the error, between 16-25. I tried 16, restarted the Server service, but had no luck. I then tried 18, and it worked. Apparently 16 and 18 seem to work well.

This setting allowed me to keep Acronis installed as well as maintaining full network access functionality.

If this helps you solve your own problem, please leave a comment. Enjoy!